


Requiem for Certainties

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s04e19 Jump the Shark, Gen, Post-The Truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-08 23:37:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skinner hadn't expected to be here again. He thought he was through talking to the dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Requiem for Certainties

Arlington, Virginia  
August 2002

The headstones marched away - their ranks stretching out and out in merciless symmetry to the horizon and somewhere far beyond. The lines of the markers crisp and certain. Unambiguous in their destination.

He hadn't expected to find himself here again. He thought he was through with the dead. He'd been sure that he had made his final visit to this place. But Mulder had asked this of him. Appearing without warning in his office this morning. Asking for a guide on this strange journey that Mulder was finally ready to make these several weeks after his return. So once more Skinner found himself cast ashore on the unyielding stone banks of the Arlington National Cemetery.

For a brief second, he experienced vertigo. An uncertainty in placeand time. A loosening of the too solid anchors that tethered him ever tighter to his grey, shadowy life. How had this happened? What was he doing here?

He had a momentary illusion that if he were to move he might split into two - the tangible, physical part of him left standing here by the three graves, and the small part of him that still had a memory of freedom vanishing into the open, blue sky. What was he doing here?

But he knew. The path here, as so many other paths in his life, wasmarked clearly, if only in retrospect. He stood beside Mulder and waited as Mulder tried to come to terms with the untimely and improbable end and resting place of the Lone Gunmen.

The sun shone with brutal clarity, and he watched the shadows cut short, sharp shapes in the immaculate lawn. He carefully tried to think of nothing at all.

It would seem to be his fate to visit this place in bright daylight. The day of the Gunmen's burial had been clear and sunny like this. Today was crueler - heat and humidity living malevolent forces. The irony of the bright sun and the surrounding sea of death was not lost on Skinner. But there was nothing hidden about death, nothing surprising. Only the time and place of each man's death was a mystery. Or at least a mystery for most.

Mulder turned to him. "How did it happen?" A naked emotion muddied the depths of his eyes.

Skinner was briefly lost. "The virus. They were exposed before..."

"No," the characteristic impatience, "How did you make it happen? How did you manage to get them buried here?" Mulder's arm swept in a wide arc, describing the improbable company in which Byers, Langly and Frohike had come to rest.

The question echoed between them for a moment. In the echo, Skinner heard Doggett's voice, "You must have pulled a lot of strings."

Strings. Tangled web. Web of lies. Yes, there were strings to be pulled; you just never knew what you might find at the other end.

Mulder still waited an answer. "It was the least I could do." The same answer he'd given Doggett.

Mulder heard some of the undertones that Doggett hadn't. He waited. A slight easing in his stance indicating a less fragile patience. The desert seemed to have taught him something about silence.

Skinner stared back, not seeing Mulder anymore, but a different place altogether. He shook his head. There were things that couldn't be explained. Only remembered.

"Are you sure, Mr. Skinner? This...well...I can make it happen, but it's highly ... irregular. And I want to make absolutely sure you understand that if I do this...that is, if you sign these papers, it means you won't be able to....er...that is..." Tiny beads of sweat appeared on the bureaucrat's brow, and Skinner watched the little man squirm. He wondered, dispassionately, who you had to piss off so royally and irrevocably that you wound up as the clerk in charge of assigning Federal grave sites.

He answered as gravely as he could. "Yes, I understand what it will take to make this happen, but it is what I want done." And that statement, he thought, covered a wealth of sins. Sins of commission and omission.

It was clear that the errand that brought Skinner to this insignificant office was making the clerk far too nervous. He shuffled the papers around his desk again. It was almost a bureaucratic Tarot, thought Skinner; as though the clerk believed if he rearranged the Federal forms often enough a pattern would emerge that wasn't so....irregular.

Skinner decided that grinning might be misinterpreted. Long years of attending senior staff meetings at the FBI had given him better than average control over his expression. He steadily maintained his poker face.

The rules for obtaining a burial site at Arlington National Cemetery are quite strict. You must have died in active duty, received one of the nation's highest military decorations, or a Purple Heart, or meet one of about a half-dozen other precise, obscure requirements. There are no exceptions. No room for interpretation, negotiation or compromise. In this, as in all they do, the military is strict.

The President, in his role as Commander in Chief or the Secretary of the Army, can grant waivers under special circumstances. Sacrificing oneself as a body explodes in a potentially lethal virus is not one of those circumstances, particularly since the government was not about to acknowledge that such an event had ever taken place.

But there are strings you can pull. If you know they exist, if you have traveled all the darker paths that the Syndicate sends you as their errand boy. If you know, he grimaced to himself, where the real skeletons are buried.

Skinner felt his hands twitch involuntarily. Dance, puppets, dance. Then a brief moment of doubt. He had been a puppet too many times before. Who could say where all these strings would lead? If you kept following this one to its end, whose hand would you find?

Too many questions. Too many doubts. He sometimes wondered how he managed to get anything done at all. He owed so many debts, and had been allied, out of choice or need, to so many sides of this strange game, that he didn't know his own name some mornings. The face in the mirror was now only partly familiar. He wasn't the same man he'd been 8 years ago. He wasn't sure what that man would have thought of the man he'd become.

He tried not to think about it too much. There was still work to be done, and throughout all the madness, he thought he had at least retained some small sense of direction. A general knowledge of where the path should take them all. But he'd come to understand, some 4 years ago that he probably wouldn't see the end of the road. That understanding made these types of decisions easier. Clearer.

He waited another eon or three, while the bureaucrat, whom he'd silently named the White Rabbit, sorted through the forms. Again. Some scribbling. Heavy sighs as the pen was pressed hard enough to leave clear impressions on the carbon copies below. Who else but the U.S. government would still have forms that had to be filled in by hand, in triplicate? The rest of the world had computerized, but here in the bowels of some forgotten government office building, it might still be 1967.

Skinner thought of all the bureaucrats scattered throughout the Washington, DC, region. The thousands of clerks who slouched through their days, certain only in the unending sameness of the tasks that they would face each day. Tasks that varied only in the names or dates of the events that were recorded. But now again, even the mighty sameness of the government had to be interrupted. Turned on its side.

Unless, of course, you worked with The X-Files. Then you could only pray for a day of boredom. And your prayers would not be answered.

Finally, with a nervous cough, the Rabbit pushed a stack of forms across the desk. "Sign here. Initial here. Sign here again, and put your Social Security Number here." There was a strange undertone to the man's voice now. A note that almost approached emotion.

Oddly, Skinner felt nothing but certainty as he signed the forms. Something like a weight lifting from his shoulders. This was the right thing to do. It had been so long since he'd been sure of the right path that finding it was exhilarating.

He had traveled so many dark and uncertain byways. He'd been caught in a game with no rules and too many players and agendas that clashed and overlapped and lay hidden beneath countless layers of duplicity. From the moment of his assignment to oversee Mulder and Scully, he'd been out of his depth. He'd blindly guessed his way from moment to moment--clinging to his sense of what was right and wrong, only to find out too late that even that couldn't always be trusted.

He had made deals that had, in blindingly and aggravatingly clear hindsight, been good, and far too many that had been bad. And finally, even good and bad had lost meaning, and he was left trying to support a crusade for a Truth he wasn't at all certain he would ever be ready to know or understand.

He was tired of shadows. Tired of grey, and yet, he thought, it might be all that was left to him. And, maybe, just maybe, he was now too tainted to live anywhere fully light or dark.

But making this decision, signing these papers, this was right. Suddenly he remembered what it was to know that something was right. Proper. True.

He signed the final line with an uncharacteristic flourish, and returned the sheaf of papers to the White Rabbit. The little man blinked for a moment or two, as though suddenly dazed by bright light. Then he picked up the forms, stamped them in all the appropriate places, and squared them, holding them perpendicular to the desk.

An unexpected formality tinged his voice. "Thank you, Assistant Director Skinner. The action you have requested is hereby completed. Your rights to burial at Arlington National Cemetery are now waived, and Mr. Frohike, Mr. Byers, and Mr. Langly are hereby granted those rights in your stead."

Skinner stood and shook the man's offered hand and left, without looking back.

 

He shook himself loose from the web of memory to find Mulder still watching him. But there was nothing to say, and finally Mulder must have seen that emptiness in his eyes. He watched as Mulder turned back to contemplate the Gunmen's markers a final time.

The day was so still. The heat seemed to have stifled sound and thought and breath. Skinner resisted the temptation to trace the lines of white markers. He didn't need to count the dead. Didn't need to remind himself of where he stood. He let his eyes wander the horizon line.

On a hill, just at the range of his vision, he caught a flash of movement. He turned his head and suddenly found himself breathless.

Fuck. The air left his chest soundlessly. His heart paused, jumped and resumed - a little too hard, a little too fast.

The old woman's face was clear. Too clear for the distance at which she stood, but he knew her. Had seen that face forever in his dreams, his nightmares, his submerged memories. Omen, harbinger, personal watcher. He hadn't seen her since that case with the prostitute. But here she was again, and the day was instantly both too hot and too cold.

He blinked, disbelief holding him rooted. Only the autonomic functions continuing. Breath, blinking, memory.

She moved, and her features blurred--reformed. Even memory faded. The blond hair and blue eyes he had last seen begging for leniency in a courtroom. A reluctant witness, who had witnessed too much and who could say too little.

Without warning, he felt the creeping, spiky pain along his arms and legs. The chittering, crawling pain of the nanites. Brief, short, a second only in duration, but enough to make him sway and gasp.

Mulder turned to him in concern, but Skinner waved him away, his face, he hoped, blank and unconcerned. "Nothing - just the heat."

Mulder narrowed his eyes, a challenge forming on his expressive face, but after a moment he turned back to the graves.

Skinner waited out the final waves of receding pain. Damn. Fuck. Shit. He'd always suspected that there was more than one set of controls to the creatures that still lurked in his body. But, he'd hoped that Krycek's death....

He should have known better than to hope.

And that was another reality with which he had to live. Krycek's death had been satisfying as hell to every one of his baser instincts. But there had been nothing righteous, nothing right about how it had happened. Vengeance dwells deep in the primitive reptilian memory centers of all our brains, but simply because an impulse is ancient doesn't make it right.

Some nights, when he couldn't sleep, Skinner tried to decide if there had ever been another route for him to take. If there had been another way that scene in the garage could have ended. In the end, he would always conclude that there both were and weren't options.

His life was as it was. His choices were his own, and those choices had turned and branched and twisted until there was only this path now, that kept bringing him back to this burial ground.

There had been a time, he knew, when he'd earned a right to rest here. But that had been an earlier death, and that time was past. Even death, certain for everyone else, was an ambiguous fate for Skinner. His final death would catch up with him some day, but until then, he had more grey paths to walk.

He set out across the fields of stone to where his Avatar waited.

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The characters and situations of The X-Files are the property of 1013 Productions and Fox Broadcasting. No infringement is intended and no profit will be made.
> 
> Author's Rant: I had peacefully retired fic - wasn't writing it anymore, at least not XF fic. Hell, I wasn't even really watching Season 9. But I did watch "Jump the Shark," and sure enough, CC left this massive, massive, aggravating hole that I just had to deal with *g* 
> 
> Thank you, as ever, to Meredith the Wonderful--Friend, Beta Extraordinaire, and all around fabulous person.
> 
> This one is for all the Skinneristas, just because.
> 
> Feedback always welcomed.


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